The first institutional benchmark for the cultural capital of brands. Built for CMOs and CEOs who can no longer afford to be culturally blind — and the agencies, investors, and analysts who advise them.
“For two decades, Sparks & Honey was the cultural intelligence arm for Omnicom’s largest brand clients. When it closed, an entire category of institutional capability vanished overnight.”
The largest agency holding companies — Omnicom, WPP, Publicis, IPG, Dentsu — collectively advise more than half the Fortune 500 on brand strategy. None of them currently operates a credible cultural intelligence function at scale.
Existing tools measure the wrong things. Social listening platforms (Brandwatch, Sprinklr) tell you what already happened. Trend forecasters (WGSN) describe surface aesthetics. Threat detection (Blackbird.ai) catches misinformation after it has already moved. None of them index cultural capital itself.
Tropos Index is the first institutional benchmark for what brands actually need: a score that measures whether their cultural standing is rising, stable, or in decline — and the foresight to act before competitors do.
The platform operates in three integrated layers. Each is sold independently. Together they form the institutional cultural intelligence stack.
The first comprehensive taxonomy of contemporary subcultures.
Cultural movements no longer organize around demographics. They organize around tribes — coherent communities defined by shared aesthetics, vocabularies, and authority structures. Tropos Index maps them with the rigor of a benchmark provider.
Cultural risk forecasting before the moment hits.
Cultural risks build slowly, then break instantly. Prophet models the probability, magnitude, and velocity of emerging cultural events — giving brands the foresight to act in days, not after the crisis lands on their CMO’s desk.
Cultural capital as a tradeable number.
Every brand worth measuring receives a Tropos Index score — 0 to 100 — that tracks its cultural standing in real time. Like NPS for loyalty or MSCI for equities. The Index becomes the citation, the boardroom number, the benchmark.
Two published artifacts show how Tropos Index thinks. Each was produced before the cultural moment it analyzes occurred.
A full briefing for the Met Gala event — Anna Wintour, Vogue, the Met Gala itself, Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez Bezos. Each entity scored on the Tropos Index with movement drivers, cultural risk flags, and 30-day forecasts.
Eight-section disclosure of the methodology: Tribe taxonomy, Prophet forecasting model, Index scoring, source architecture, the Cultural Consultant Network, confidence intervals, and the governance protocol. Categories disclosed; weights proprietary.
Sparks & Honey’s shutdown in May 2024 left the cultural intelligence function unowned at every major holdco. The first credible replacement defines the category.
For the first time, ingesting, structuring, and pattern-matching cultural signals at the scale of human civilization is operationally tractable for a small team. The infrastructure cost has collapsed.
Bud Light. Balenciaga. Pepsi. Disney. Cracker Barrel. The cadence of cultural misfires destroying enterprise value is accelerating. CMOs are buying risk mitigation, not innovation.
A bounded cohort of strategic partners who help build the institution. In exchange for half-price service and locked-in pricing through Year 3, they provide case studies, testimonials, referrals, and advisory input.
12-month commitment. Quarterly billing. Founding Partners commit to providing a case study, a testimonial, and at least three peer referrals over the engagement term. Standard MSA-grade contract terms apply.
A career in digital product management at the intersection of finance and media. A creative network spanning directors, writers, and producers shaping the next decade of American culture. A conviction that the institutional cultural intelligence function needs to be rebuilt from first principles — and that the founder of that institution should look like the audience whose culture it indexes.
Tropos Index is being built as a sovereign operation: methodology-first, founder-led, accountable to the brands and institutions that will eventually license the Index as a benchmark.
Field Notes — the official Substack publication — is where the methodology, the cultural movements, and the brand movements are documented in real time. Subscribers include CMOs, agency strategists, brand investors, and academic researchers.
Subscribe to Field Notes →— Chris Jackson, Founder